Welcome to "Keepin' Track of the MAAC"

Hello, and welcome to "Keepin' Track of the MAAC," a new blog dedicated entirely to Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference basketball news, features, insights, perspective and opinions. In other words, a little of everything.

Your "blogkeeper" is Steve Amedio, whose covered the conference for 18 consecutive years. That made me the most-tenured MAAC "beat" writer in the conference's history.

I primarily covered Siena men's and women's basketball from the 1985-86 season through 2006-07 for The Troy Record and The Schenectady Gazette, newspapers in upstate New York. Before that, I covered Army and Marist basketball for the Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald-Record from 1976-1985 and have been around long enough to have seen Mike Krzyzewski's early coaching years at West Point. And, prior to that, I covered college basketball for The Troy Record for three years in the early 1970s.

Over that time, I won more than a dozen writing awards, including a national honor for a series of stories about recruiting and a state award most recently for a story about former UMass basketball standout Rashaun Freeman, a Schenectady High School product, who overcame dyslexia on his way to a college degree.

This blog is intended to be similar to my previous work covering Siena College, only about the entire MAAC. I'll see every team play at least once, many twice, and ... there's also the magic of TV.

The MAAC has become a strong mid-major basketball conference that does things the right way. Those who follow it regularly recognize that there is a high-degree of competitive balance among its teams, both on the men's and women's side, nearly every year. And, the MAAC's ability to compete beyond the scope of its own league is growing, too, as evidenced by two NCAA tournament victories by the Marist women in 2007, a first-round victory in 2008 and a lopsided first-round victory by the Siena men's team over Vanderbilt in the 2008 NCAA tournament.

It has been a pleasure to watch the MAAC's growth, and the expectation is that the conference will continue to move forward.

I look forward to this new opportunity to chronicle the continued progression of the MAAC while telling its stories in this forum.

Hope you'll enjoy it, and stop by often.